Awards

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The Romans had their arenas, Elizabethan England had bear baiting and Obama's America has the trial. HLN has already shot past CNN with wall-to-wall coverage of the latest trial whose defendant is indistinguishable from a celebrity and whose coverage is barely distinguishable from that of the movie premiere.

But in between the usual criminal cases whose defendants seem like failed aspirants for the Big
Brother house or Survivor, reality TV stars who found fame with a butcher knife, are the politically edifying cases. The ones that aren't just meant to humiliate and degrade the participants and the viewers, but to indoctrinate them as well.

It is into this category that the Zimmerman trial falls. It's an involuntary case based on insufficient evidence whose course was compelled by government intervention. And like the tribunals of the French Revolution or the Moscow Trials; it's there to teach us something. And the thing it's there to teach us is racism hysteria.

Racism is the new sex for a creed of politically correct puritans who are obsessed with a new kind of prurience. As the last sexual taboos fall by the wayside, the new taboos are political and the new witch hunts are all about exposing hidden reservoirs of bigotry among celebrity chefs and lurking White Hispanic menaces.

The intimate moral faults that keep a population in a state of conformity and terror are no longer sexual, but political. The new prudery is political and the new hypocrisy is racial, knotted over with double standards and exceptions for the watchers and the elites who are exempt from the occasional witch trial, no matter how many black cats and cauldrons they own.

Racial tolerance has long since become racial denunciation. Tolerance has become paranoia. The fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Of giving the wrong impression. Of failing to be properly guilty for some vague complicity of privilege and oppression. Those fears and guilts must be constantly reinvigorated with fresh doses of trials and denunciations. Public spectacles to serve as reminders that the greatest evil of all lurks everywhere and that we must stand vigilant against it.

The graduate of a modern liberal arts university receives training in spotting and identifying the most obscure forms of bigotry. He isn't taught to spot burning crosses, but to denounce implicit narrative privilege. The microscope that he wields to spot the most obscure forms of bigotry imaginable doesn't really detect bigotry, it manufactures it. It crafts his higher moral ground by exposing the wrongdoing of everyone and everything else.

His or her contemporaries have few skills, except the familiar one from every totalitarian state of denouncing enemies of the state for some trivial act. Having been turned into inquistioners by an educational system that is terrible at producing engineers or scientists, but spectacular at producing politically correct policemen of public spaces, they might as well inquisition.

Bigotry is the bugbear of the moment, but next year it might be salt or short hair. Racism just happens to be easier to rally against. It also comes with the most moral authority points.

The Soviet Union reduced everything to class and built its moral authority to rule around economic redistribution and the classless society. The United States from LBJ onward reduced everything to race and built its moral authority to rule around social harmony. The enemy that disrupts that social harmony is eroding the latest accomplishments in the national social progress program.

The pursuit of bigotry has as little to do with fighting actual racism as witch hunts had to do with hunting actual witches. Real Neo-Nazis and Klansmen can't get arrested in this town. Overt bigotry is boring and actual racists have taken to showing up at courthouses in Nazi uniforms to get attention. . There's no point in hunting a witch who boasts about her witchcraft. There's no sport to it.

The whole point of baiting a bear is to get the bear to react. The Roman arenas wouldn't have lasted very long without gladiators willing to fight. And the entire tawdry spectacle of the trial and the morality mob requires cooperating defendants who care what the faceless mass audience thinks of them and try to prove their innocence.

Taboos by their very nature involve shame. Exposing some secret bigotry, denouncing a man as a bigot on the flimsiest of grounds, involves sport. The bear struggles and fights back. He tries to understand what's happening. He cries and apologizes. There's shame and guilt on display. But take that away and the inquisitioners have nothing to work with.

There is no drama in denouncing a man who has no shame and no secret fears of being dragged out of the crowd to be charged with disrupting its social harmony. Denouncing Andrew Dice Clay and Alec Baldwin, two of the actors in Woody Allen's next movie, is pointless. Neither of the men care. Both have public personas built on being politically incorrect. But denouncing Paula Deen proved to be a rich feast of degradation and humiliation for the politically correct crowd. And power.

The entire sport isn't about racism, it's about power. The witch hunt isn't about fighting evil, it's about turning to a face in the crowd and then dragging them out as a human sacrifice to the collective power of the crowd and the moral authority of the inquisitioners. The victim is denounced for secretly lacking the same commitment to social values as everyone else in the crowd. And everyone in the crowd recommits to those values with a mixture of fear and triumph. Triumph over the vulnerability of another human being and fear that their own hypocrisies, their own little sins, will be exposed.

Mass hysteria of this kind is built on elevating one value above all others. It gives its crusaders the sanction to behave in the ugliest possible ways for the greater good. It silences all dissent through a moral power that isn't truly moral, but is nothing more than calculated hysteria enforced by terror.

Racism is still a problem in America, but the Anti-Racists don't care about it. Hysterias are never about solving real problems, but about using complicity and conformity to enforce a moral order. The new moral order uses charges of bigotry to destroy its enemies and to spread fear, but it never really bothers to do anything about real racism. It has a thousand enforcement arms to investigate and denounce bigotry, but it rarely bothers with real discrimination. Instead it harasses businesses that conduct background checks or refuse to hire employees with criminal records. The goal, as always, is not to deal with bigotry, but to spread fear and uncertainty, to create compliance through paranoia.

The Zimmerman case was supposed to be one more reminder that racism is the gravest threat to America since the Y2K virus. And however the case ends, the political correct police will have won by once again asserting the supremacy of their value, combating racism, over all other values, including such obscure trinkets like telling the truth. The very existence of the trial and the months of dishonest news coverage has once again enforced a mandatory hysteria about the racism menace.

Next week it will probably be something else. Perhaps the Voting Rights Act again, a 60s measure that is more dated than the The Ronettes. Or another local crime story blown up out of proportion and turned into yet another teachable moment. It doesn't much matter. The purpose of the entire exercise was never justice, it was about intimidation and brainwashing.

Racism in America, at and from all the country's races, will continue in diminishing amounts for the foreseeable future following a predictable trajectory that had nothing to do with all the sensitivity seminars and other profiteering elements of the racism industry. Meanwhile the racism industry, its shadow twin, will go on expanding and getting bigger. There will be more money, more seminars, more laws and more show trials. The new frontier of bigotry is gay rights and there will be plenty of power and fear to be gained from the next wave of lawsuits, firings, boycotts and morality mobs.

America is at once becoming more racially sane and more racially insane. It is becoming less racist and more race obsessed. Its best and brightest often appear to have few abilities other than spotting and denouncing bigotry. The country is paradoxically becoming post-racial and racially obsessed.

The United States no longer leads the world in space or in many areas of science and technology. Its literature has become forgettable and the great skyscrapers are being built in Asia and the Middle East. But it leads the world in racial hysteria, an obsession as irrational as the satanic sex abuse kindergartens and the witch trials. We can't go back to the moon, but our social engineers stalk the corridors of power with microscopes that claim to peer into the human heart.

30
comments:

Anonymous
said...

Sultan,

You have such a command with words - whatever prose you write! Always on target, well thought, cohesive, and with reason.

I sincerely wish you become as big a contributor in Politics/Sociology as Rush Limbaugh is in Conservatism.

The Ronettes are hardly dated. They rock. Great post. I've been following the Zimmerman trial pretty closely, and the related commentary. It's very difficult to find much discussion of the actual facts, since as you point out, the narrative is established and the facts are twisted to fit it.

I concur with your observations regarding the symptoms but profoundly disagree with your analysis of the situation. Whites have fled the cities and accepted Black dominance of key aspects of popular culture (such as music and some pro sports). We don't even need to talk about the massive redistribution of wealth from Whites to Blacks, do we? Even that is not sufficient-- the elites demand a kind of cultural integration that is antithetical to normal whites (show me a truly 'integrated' neighborhood that's successful-- there aren't any). I believe America will (is) grow(ing) MORE racially aware. Black America was never anything less that 100% mobilized for its own interests. White America will soon recognize that there is no act of contrition that meets the never-ending demands for "social justice", will grow indifferent, then (rightly) resentful and ultimately will return to a racial realism it once practiced as a matter of course.

It's a terrible truth your pen wields when I proffer the greatest praise I can give, yet do so behind the shield of anonymity. Why anonymity? Simple, by accident I worked in Government directly with the race industrial complex as one of their own. I watched high-level decision be made where the most qualified men & women were denied powerful position on the basis of the most scurrilous charges of racism.

Powerful piece and all to prescient I fear. I fear for my country for it has indeed become what you say. The spectacle of the arena coupled with the hypocrisy of the auto de fey.

Great point about how they virtually ignore the open racists. Maybe we should all just become open racists and they'll leave us alone. After all, the question of differences between races (or between individuals for that matter) should be a matter of empirical observation. "White men can't jump", right?

The left lives in a wild fantasy world where everyone is exactly the same, not just equal before the law (which no one is anymore.) What a mess!

Great post but I am going to disagree with you slightly. It is now specifically both race and class. And it completely permeates the actual implementation of the K-12 ed reforms through a little known executive order of July 28, 2012 for Positive School Climates. Number 1 on the list of curricula and practices that promote positive school cultures references social justice.

http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/making-race-and-class-oppression-the-locomotives-driving-the-positive-school-climate-mandate/ laid it out using the 10Cs Framework the ed schools, especially Harvard's are pushing.

As you noted this also permeates higher ed. The diversity mandate and changing the nature of coursework to make it accessible to all is coming from the accreditation agencies. So the shifts are mandatory and mostly out of sight.

Finally to highlight the combo and how this is ascending in its importance of using education as its vehicle, a conference opens today in Chicago. Run by the Education for Liberation Network it specifically targets low income parents and students of color. To help them identify the sources of inequality so they can seek redress.

We are cultivating grievances in people while simultaneously keeping them ignorant of what the real drivers of stagnation and loss of jobs are.

Your eloquence on this huge issue is so important. But it is just ramping up and using K-12 and college to politicize and radicalize ALL students in the need for fundamental transformation is the theme of conference after conference.

AERA's theme in April was Poverty and why it is still with us. And what education can do about it. No wonder they view Bill Ayers as leadership material.

As usual, thank you Mr. Greenfield.It seems to me that this all boils down to a determination to not recognize what is obviously true: That Africans and their descendants in the US have, on average, a significantly lower IQ than their European or Asian fellow citizens, and that this fact will ensure that they are always (on average) at the bottom of the economic and social ladder. This combined with the innate (genetic) traits of the African, condemns them to failure in any advanced society. Thus are developed the theories of "white Privilege" and "systemic racism" to explain black failure, if it isn't nature, then it must be nurture, right?It is useful sometimes to play historical "what if?". Imagine if instead of Africans being imported to work the fields, Chinese peasants, or coolies, as they were called, had been used instead, as they were in their hundreds of thousands to build railways out West. In what ways would our society be different today? For a start the national average IQ would be higher, there would be no racial grievance industry and Detroit would still be a prosperous city. I could go on and on, but you get the point.

72% the Black kids are raised by single mothers, and that's the real injustice. People have long forgotten the Million Man March in D.C. that was supposed to cure this problem. Well, its leaders got nice fees for their passionate speeches. They got new grants, they got plenty of TV coverage and promotions. The percentage of the Black kids raised by single mothers has since increased, but that's not newsworthy, just a small detail. It's time to get new grants, to fight new battles.

Very true. The end result of State sponsored racism (aka reverse racism) will be an explosion of white racism once this era of political correctness is no longer able to control the social injustices being forced upon them

Hiring preferences, media blackouts of black crimes, persecution of whites for words and acts that are on open display by the black community, all will one day become more than the non black society can bear and the repercussions will be a racial divide worse than ever before

Racism begets racism. I grew up in the 60s and 70s and was disgusted with the opportunities I believed were being denied the black community. Our all knowing liberal government had the opportunity to level the field but opted, instead, to tilt it in favor of blacks which accomplished nothing but a dedicated voter base and fomenting an eventual rebellion by the newly oppressed white, hispanic and other races; none of whom are now offered those same opportunities

What your article points out Daniel is the fact that human nature never changes. Since the Fall, man has had to develop new ways to assert his desire to be his own god by oppressing other men. Slavery and racism make one believe they are superior over the other and are hallmarks of human history.

Anonymous & Hanna, you may be political correct but not reality correct. Which black society where in the world has produced what, be it material or ideological or cultural of lasting value? And yes, the racial hypersensitivity minefield of today in America is the consequence of slavery and as such historic justice for that grave inhumanity.

@Hanna,Unwittingly Hanna you prove the point that Mr. Greenfield is making. The major point I made was that the average IQ of negroes is very significantly lower than all other racial groups. Hanna, this is not up for discussion, it is proven fact and explains a lot about the continual failure of sub Saharan Africa and any community where significant numbers of African descended people live. You may find the facts repugnant but they are still the facts. The joke about all this is of course that in a truly color blind society it wouldn't matter. I suspect that you are young and idealistic, good for you, but if you want to understand how the world is you have to shake off the pre-conceived ideas, forget about what is conventionally acceptable or not, and even cast aside all principle, and see what actually is. By all means maintain your own personal standards, but don't try and judge the world by them.Peace and good luckroger in florida

Isn't it odd how IQ means nothing until you need it to prove that others are lesser than yourself?Little Roger, I am older than you think and hence the lack of rushing to judge what others are or are not based on what some pseudo science says.The older you get, the more you fall short of the mark yourself, the less likely you are to judge others, especially based on the world's knowledge.

Any time someone mentions IQ, it drives some people to anger and insults. Around 1995 two social scientists, Murray and Hernstein, wrote a book called "The Bell Curve" that revealed that blacks scored approx. 15 IQ points lower than white contemporaries. They were very fair, saying those blacks scored the same as whites tested two generations before, and those whites increased their IQ's when they were immersed in society for some time. It was not necessarily a genetic thing, they showed, but still the authors were despised and destroyed, as much as possible, by the Left.The black culture and Government programs isolate that community to keep them dependent, so their IQ's do not increase. The most negaive things that can possibly be done to them are happening: single parent homes, poor or no education, drugs, criminal role models, Ebonics, welfare that encourages laziness, everything to make them worthless to themselves, their families, and Society.Thomas Sowell reviewed the book in the American Spectator: http://tiny.cc/kyv2zwRegards.

Roger in Florida has data and experience on his side. See Rushton, Watson, Schweitzer, Murray, Richwine, FBI crime stats, SAT results, graduation rates, et al. Race is not a social construct. It is as much a part of our humanity as any of our other biological variations. The Bell Curve exists and no amount of wishing it were otherwise, however well intentioned, will disguise the fact that there are differences between the races. Your reflexive rejection is based on a conception of self that does not reflect the reality of the moment or situation we are in. You want to be color-blind-- you want blacks to be white because that means you're a 'nice person'. I'm a 'nice person' and I suspect Roger in FLA is as well. It doesn't change the reality of our situation-- as disagreeable and unwelcome as it may be.

Hanna;What are you talking about?Have I mentioned my IQ? Pseudo science? Are you completely mad?Answer this question Hanna and Anonymous: Is there a difference between average negro IQ and average white, Asiatic or Jewish IQ?Take off the filters Hanna and you will see the world as it is. But you are filled with hate and pre-conceived notions aren't you Hanna? As to my IQ: I would guess that my IQ is around 20 points lower than Mr. Greenfield's. SO WHAT? I struggled with the mathematics in my engineering degree, while others of higher IQ had no problem, but I excelled as a design engineer and construction manager during my career. Probably I am less wealthy and certainly less talented as an analyst than Mr. Greenfield, but again; SO WHAT? Both of you demonstrate what is completely broken about this issue; you are following the politically correct agenda and you refuse to face the truth.

"72% the Black kids are raised by single mothers, and that's the real injustice."

Yes, the fact that black women have unprotected sex and become pregnant with babies they cannot feed and care for is quite an injustice. These women should be required to take mandatory birth control shots in exchange for a check. The fact that African society is set up on this same model sparks no curiosity in you? Single mothers are not heroes in Western society. We used to shame this behavior. Now we have downgraded ourselves to the level of black underclass behaviors.

2. "Then somebody like Roger pops up and You think, aw shucks!"

Do you say "Aw Shucks" as your government demographically replaces you? White men who do not celebrate other white men who advocate for white culture are the enemy. Do you feel that whites deserve to live as as distinct people with a distinct culture in their own homelands?

"Hysterias are never about solving real problems, but about using complicity and conformity to enforce a moral order. The new moral order uses charges of bigotry to destroy its enemies and to spread fear, but it never really bothers to do anything about real racism."

all of us in this racially-obsessed society, have become moving pieces on a game-board. you have eloquently hit the nail on the head. bravo.

Is everyone aware of the politically correct industry's latest product? It's called "implicit bias" or "unconscious bias" and it's about rascism/biases/bigoted beliefs that a person (white, of course) doesn't even realize he or she has.

Imagine the accusations, regulations and lawsuits that can proceed from this perverse little tool. Now the PC crowd can reach right into one's unconscious mind to punish and profit.

'There's no point in hunting a witch who boasts about her witchcraft.'

'There's no point in hunting a witch who boasts about her witchcraft.'

No, the reason is that there is no (or much less) power to be gained by it. Lording it over misfits isn't an efficient method of wielding power. Destroying the powerful, so that others live in fear is.

Art West:The appalling tyranny you refer to is only the logical extension what has been and is still being enforced through "implied discrimination". The political elite refuse to face the actual reasons for African-American dysfunction and failure, so come up with the theory of "white privilege", etc. This should include "Chinese privilege" , "Japanese privilege", "Vietnamese privilege", etc. as all these groups and many others have no problem prospering to some level in our apparently irredeemably racist white society. So when an incorrect solution is applied to an incorrectly identified problem, then clearly further, and more tyrannical, methods are needed to force the solution; the solution sought being "equality of result".This whole racist society BS is particularly noxious because clearly what white (and other) people object to is behavior, not skin color, and of course behavior is not a race. The most fundamental freedoms have been stripped from us in order to further this concept.Anti-discrimination laws erode our rights of association, free speech and property. If I am not free to discriminate; then in what sense am I free?There are about 120,000 lawyers in the Justice Dept. many of them are affirmative action blacks who were admitted to Law Schools despite being unqualified to practice law both in terms of intellect and character (the Obamas are classic examples of this). These are vacuumed up by the Govt. so as to provide employment as lawyers for people who are totally unsuited to practice law. They justify to themselves their selection on the basis of "systemic white racism", which does not exist in reality, and take their black liberation socialist, critical race theory BS with them.Is it any wonder that our society is becoming more tyrannical?Incidentally; the reason I asked Hanna if she is Jewish is that Jews go to great lengths to maintain their racial and societal homogeneity, and perfectly justifiably in my view, but seem to be in the forefront of pushing the "multicultural" extinction of the white race.